Category: Medicine
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Medical Credit Stores: Sorry, You Only Qualify for Subprime Medical Care
Bob Sullivan reports at MSNBC on the early developments of a medical privacy score by Fair Issac, the same company that invented the credit score for lenders. This is somewhat scary, because the entire point of credit scores is to make decision making easier, so easy that people very low on the totem pole can…
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Wounds!
Despite the best attempts of the New York Times Wellness Blog to get me fired, I’m still here and doing fine. Somehow a post about how impressed I was with surgery, the professionals that practice it, and how many of my preconceptions about surgeons were incorrect, got all turned around into some “peak behind the…
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A week of surgery – some impressions
One only has to be minimally involved in a surgical procedure to understand the appeal of this profession. It is instantly gratifying and very rewarding to be able to just fix something. That, working under time pressure and mixture of physical and mental skill make it a very exciting way to practice medicine. So after…
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My feet hurt
Eight hours standing in a single spot, how do surgeons do it? I’m hoping my endurance will build, especially knowing that some of the procedures I’m going to see in the next few weeks such as the “Whipple” or pancreaticoduodenectomy may take twice as long. The good news is that I have lucked into working…
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Ask A Scienceblogger – Why don’t they make a birth control pill for men?
This time the Ask a Scienceblogger Challenge is to explain why a male contraceptive pill does not exist. Good question! It’s because medical researchers are all sexist bastards. Didn’t you know? Actually that’s only part of the reason. Research into hormonal or pharmaceutical contraception for men is a hot topic. Male hormonal contraception is actually…
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Surgery!
This new year is shaping up to be pretty exciting, and part of the changes in my life will be reflected in what I write about on the blog. First let me explain how the MD/PhD program I’m in works, and where I am in it. The Medical Science Training Program (MSTP) or MD/PhD program…
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Obesity Crankery Part II
Orac alerted me, based on my recent obesity writings, of a new crank obesity attack on science. This latest is in the form of a rebuttal to Morgan Spurlock’s excellent film Supersize me. Comedian Tom Naughton, who has all the charisma of a wet sponge, is making his own documentary Fathead: You’ve been fed a…
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Another assault on Evidence-based medicine
Except this time it’s from the right! Richard Dolinar of the Heartland Institute (a crank tank) writes in TCS Daily that evidence-based medicine (EBM) is bad for patients. A new buzzword entered the medical lexicon in 1992 when the Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group published one of the first articles on the phenomenon in the Journal…
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Attacking the FDA – Pseudoscience masking itself as patient advocacy
Speaking of libertarians, reading the JCI this week I came across this wonderful review of Richard Epstein’s new book, “Overdose: How excessive government regulation stifles pharmaceutical innovation”. We’ve discussed Epstein, and his ilk before. The libertarians that routinely attack the FDA as some kind of bogeyman, killing kids, eating babies, blah blah blah, when the…
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Obesity and Overweight – what do these new studies really mean?
Multiple news sources have been covering this recent article in JAMA (1) which provides epidemiological evidence that being overweight (but not obese) may decrease the risk of some illnesses, while not increasing one’s overall mortality from cardiovascular disease. Given that we’ve talked about overweight and obesity recently on the blog, I think it’s worthwhile to…